Have you ever been curious about what presidents usually say on their inauguration? Which words they use most frequently? How long the speeches are? What are emotions conveyed by these speeches? Will presidents change their speeches’ style between several terms? Well, today we have chance to find out some of your questions! Based on 58 speeches given by 40 USA presidents in history, we will explore fun facts within it.
Let’s get started!
Here we compare presidents on two most famous parties – Democratic and Republican.
Hmm… It seems that there’s no big difference between most frequently used words by these two parties. They all focus on ‘people’, ‘govern’, ‘nation’, etc. Since these are inauguation speeches, presidents would like to say many ‘will’ to illustrate what they are going to do in their terms of office.
In order to better understanding, you can check top 10 used words in every year below.
One of most direct way to inspect presidents’ speech-style is figuring out how many words do they use in speech.
We notice that some presidents give speeches of very different length in their several terms. Do they change their writing style during terms? Let’s do more research on how they use words.
First, we want to inspect President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is the only one who has 4 terms! In this plot, different colors mean different terms and y-axis means how many words are used in each sentence. We can know that his style doesn’t change so much because dots in every color have similar distribution according to y-axis. How about some other guys whose speeches’ length vary a lot? For example, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, James Monroe and William McKinley.
It’s clear that Abraham Lincoln’s speech length change much while George Washington’s words using style change much.
We are also attracted to highest bar in former bar chart – William Henry Harrison. Why his speech has so many words? Generally speaking, sentence consist of 10-15 words but below we can show you his sentences consist of more than 80 words, which are super super long.
Tell you a secret, I like movie ‘Inside Out’ very much. How about we analysis all speeches based on same color theme – yellow for joy, purple for fear, red for anger, blue for sadness, green for disgust.
By the way, highly recommend this movie :D Of course, joy dominates the whole. Unfortunately, things not always go well. For example, Great Depression happens just after Coolidge Prosperity. How speeches change with history events?
Herbert Hoover becomes president at the end of Coolidge Prosperity while Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes president at the biginning of Great Depression. We can see that Herbert Hoover’s speech has more positive sentiment. What does Franklin D. Roosevelt say in his first term inauguation speech?